"Tell me, what
is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious
life? "– Mary
Oliver

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Here
are a few essays from my upcoming book:

Dumb Blonde
Dishes Dirt and Discourses.

These slice of life stories are
coming soon to a digital reader near you.

why rock star Nikki Sixx
of Motley Crue faked his New York Times
bestseller, The Heroin Diaries

why men really like big breasts.

what's the murder mystery
that Stanford University doesn't want to talk
about?

Did the president of Stanford really murder
Jane Stanford?

how you can be happy about
being sick

why someone would spill the
beans on a corrupt judge and make her number
one in Google

They say what determines if a little girl lives in Pink
Land is her mother. Some girls haven't got a clue
what Pink Land is because Mom doesn't give a damn about
it. Mom, you can let her visit Pink Land but
you have to get her out. The price of living in Pink
Land is high.

In Pink Land, the land of fluff and cute,
girls learn bodies are for adorning, primping, preening,
objectifying and sexualizing. Little girl Pink Land
doesn't stay that way. It morphs into a deeper pink
of silk thongs and black lace. By the time she is
ten, she's there.

If you think pink, and she thinks pink, and she worries if
her butt is fat at seven, she might be giving blow jobs by
twelve. Think there is no connection? Play
connect a dots and you get there: "Oh, you are so cute in
that outfit. Oh, look, this looks so good on
you. Your hair is beautiful, let's get your nails
done." And when she wants to be wanted, what does she have
to give? Not much except her body, which is all she
knows. Her personality subsumed under years of lip gloss
and blush, she gives what she has been trained to use.

When you think pink and sexualize her, do not be surprised
when she follows your cue. Underneath the "isn't she
cute?" of adoring mothers is a budding hottie. Hips askew,
hand behind head, and carrying a designer purse, she's
learning how to use her body and get rewarded. Hair
fixation of mothers leads to hair fixation of daughter.
Designer duds may look great, but a whining bitchy 12 year
old who has to shop at Target is not. "I will NOT
shop there. It's gross. I'll die."

Slap.

Mom doesn't know where the bitch came from. She grew in
the process called self-objectification that describes a
girl who sees herself through other's eyes and seeks
outside validation. Unable to give it to herself she is
validated when a boy wants what she has to give.

The American Psychological Association recently issued a
report called The Sexualization of American Girls and the
findings are disturbing. Strongly disturbing. The result
of the social, cultural and parental emphasis on looks is
not minor: low self-esteem, eating disorders, and
depression. The rate of completed suicides of teen girls
has never been higher.

The antidote is clear: social connections, community
connections, athletics, and academics. Girls who are
into sports learn to use their bodies to be powerful. They
are less depressed and have higher grades.

Think before you pink. Dead is not cute.

Behind the
Scenes: Rock Star Angst and Accusations

(Nikki Sixx wanted
time out when Donna was pregnant. He got it.
When Donna found out time out meant 'girls, girls, girls',
she insisted he go to rehab. While there he sent her
letters describing his fears, his pain, and what he
needed from her. The betrayal was ignored. While he
was surrounded by therapists and support groups Donna was
home alone with a newborn. No support group for her -
instead she was expected to be supportive for Nikki who
left a folder on his computer with all the emails from all
the girls he slept with while Donna was pregnant.)

Nikki thinks Donna slept with Tommy
Lee. He calls him Star Fucker Boy in a letter he
wrote to her. He says he could not accept it if she
slept with him. This is both projection and
misogyny. In Nikki's world, if you have a body and
one of the opposite sex is near you, and is young enough,
you have sex with it. Bodies come and bodies go. You
fuck them while they are there.

That's Nikki's world, not Donna's. She had just
given birth a few months earlier when he wrote those
words. It wasn't Donna who was sleeping around - but
Nikki assumes that if she is in the same room with Tommy
she will have sex. That's what Nikki would do, so
she became the object of his projection and accuses
her of doing what he would.

She also become the victim of misogyny. He wants her
to accept and forgive the drugs, the women, the
heartache. His women, his flings - "Donna will
understand."

Why? Why does Donna have to be the compliant,
understanding, never complaining wife of the real star
fucker? Because that's the job as rock star wife
according to the world of Nikki.

When Nikki goes to Cottonwood for rehab she
hurts. When Nikki has an affair, the world knows
about it first. Her pregnancy was a scary time
with her husband gone. Now he is gone again and
though the words sound sincere, they are the same
ones, coming back yet again - the ones he uses when
he wants forgiveness. Donna is afraid of the source
of his words because he brings them out to woo and seduce
and then they disappear again, locked in a vault and
opened only when needed.

Nikki accuses Donna of not caring what happens to
him. He wants her to focus on his recovery.
She's home with the kids so he can recover.

But when does she get to recover? Where do she
go?

If Nikki wants recovery only on his terms, recovery has
failure built-in.

1.
Cooking the Cosmic Books

A woman was complaining to her
therapist how badly her husband treated her and how
he left her for someone else. She wondered
why, if he was such a bad person, he was so
happy.And
the therapist replied: "The Universe will take care
of your husband's shortcomings...... He will get his
sooner or later because there is a perfect accounting
system in the Universe."Really?
I'd
like to see the books of that accounting system. The
universe is not a karmic justice generator. If
there is an accounting system someone is cooking the books
because lots of jerks walk around doing bad things and are
content, perhaps even happy. Learning
to
live in a world where jerks are happy is possible.
Enjoy the cosmic joke and find a new punch line.

It defines everything from the alpha male,
finite resources and hunter gatherer perspective.
It’s easy to throw everything into the ‘evolution made
me do it’ pile, and so currently in vogue to do
so.

The
latest
entry in the evolutionary psychology cult is an
explanation of why men like big breasts. Apparently it
is because old big breasts sag and young ones
don’t. Thus, the alpha male who wants a young
woman doesn’t have to disturb any brain cells to think,
“Do I want this one?” He can simply look,
and his brain cells kick in alerting him to the high
level cognitive thinking process of, “Hmm, perky ones
there...ok, she’s mine.”

And this way of thinking has thus evolved into a chain
called Hooter's.

Explaining happiness.
For this we turn to Daniel Nettle of Oxford University
who tells us, "Evolution hasn't set us up for the
attainment of happiness, only its pursuit."
Apparently this makes sense because only those who
survived in the distant genetic past were those
dissatisfied with the way things were and who set about
pursuing happiness, giving rise to the "pursuit of
happiness" gene which eventually became part of the gene
pool.

Be
happy, die young? If we are genetically programmed
to always pursue happiness, why can’t someone use that
as a legal defense for drinking or smoking
crack? That would give rise to the latest
expert witness: The Pursuit of Happiness
Psychologist.

This isn't about koalas. It isn't even
about napping. It is about pain,
persistence, hope, optimism and future
orientation.

It's also about no more Pollyanna placebo,
mindfulness meditation and spiritual savior
agendas for the sick. It's about taking it
up a notch from the feel good to the real good.

Finding myself in the Albuquerque Zoo one day
during my Albuquerque year, my pain
reached enormous levels. At the koala's
home, there was a large bench on the visitor
side of the enclosure. I told my then 10
year old son I was going to lie down for a
while. Only in a prone position did the
chronic muscle spasms in my neck find
relief.

These were no ordinary stiff neck muscles, no,
these were ones that caused massage therapists
to tell me not to return. These muscles
were so tonic one doctor called them
bands of steel, and another blurted out,
I'd kill myself if I was you.

I soldiered on for about eight years, through
therapy after therapy, doctors, mud baths,
creams, potions and lotions. But never a pain
pill. (I would do that differently now.) I
researched so much I could talk about the role
of dopamine in relaxing muscles, calcium
channels, and knew all about trigger point
therapy. I had books, consultants,
exercises. Still the pain persisted.

One night when the pain had moved to my
shoulders, it was so bad I could not lift my
arms. I began to wonder why I had no
solution and to make myself feel better I would
think along the lines of, "Every
problem has a solution, I haven't found this one
yet."

I wasn't a complainer. Most people knew I had
the neck problem, but they knew it because I
described it, not because I complained about
it. I was getting tired of it and thinking
of it in terms of an unsolved problem was
revving me back up to persevere some more for an
answer.

I was also getting tired of being told to
meditate or go for yet another massage. Massage
made it worse. If that sounds counterintuitive,
I understand. But an hour after a
massage it was like my muscles were on fire. I
suspect inflammatory cytokines were being
released, but I don't know.

And then one day, in an area I had researched
before, but for some reason had not fully
explored, I had my answer. I was reading a
medical book at
Stanford. It led me to some ideas
and I raced home and got on the
computer. Sure enough, with a little bit more
poking around I had my answer. I don't
even remember the name of the syndrome any more
- Gordon's maybe. And the cure? Thyroid
pills.

They arrived. I began my treatment, test,
hypotheses, and voile! Five days later my
muscles started softening. I was driving the car
and entering a roadway where I had to turn my
neck sharply to see other cars entering. I
usually turned my whole body. This time, I
turned my neck. And six years later, I am still
ok. One time I ran out of thyroid.
Five days later the muscles spasmed up.
The agony had returned. I knew my answer was
right. By this time I had seen a doctor who
upped me to 3 mg and congratulated me on my
diagnosis.

Now, I have tinnitus. It's random, but
when it is there, I don't like it. I've done a
lot of research: zinc, ginkgo, Chinese herbs,
xanax. Sometimes the xanax works. Then the
silence is beautiful. Sometimes it doesn't and I
shrug my shoulders and say, "Every problem has a
solution and I haven't found this one yet."

Last week I was at Kepler's, a bookstore in
Menlo Park, CA, near my home, and I perused a book on neuroplasticity.
And there it was - a hint, a clue..there is an
answer to stopping the noise. It lies in
the auditory cortex and someone is working on
it. I am curious, I look for clues, my
life is full of problems with solutions I
haven't found yet. Every problem has a
solution and until I get tired of living, I will
keep on looking.

Koalas like eucalyptus leaves. I liked
napping with the koalas. It was meditation and
massage in one and better than either done the
usual way.

"I'm just a
cockeyed optimist and I'm stuck like a dope
with this thing called Hope
and I can't get it out of my Heart…." - South Pacific

People ask if I am afraid
of writing about the ethical lapses of a judge in
Texas with ties to the Bush family or her cohorts that
manipulate the system to their advantage. Or do I
worry about writing an unflattering piece about an
L.A. divorce attorney who could teach Houdini a
trick or two? Do I worry about making fun of Palo
Alto lawyers who teach ethics and turn around and share
private client emails with one another throwing ethics
out the window? Or sending proof of fraud of an
attorney to his peers?

Of
course
not. This isn't the stuff in life to worry
about. I worry about why my low carb diet isn't
working this time and why hiking and biking aren't the
easy ways to lose weight they used to be and why
children have to die in wars.

My
brain isn't wired to worry about what will happen if I
unmask certain truths. Let the chips fall where
they may. A made up story told to me long
ago and a chance to uncover the truth began
a neural pathway that determined future
action. I was nine or ten when I couldn't stand
not knowing her one more minute and I grabbed my birth
certificate and walked for two miles to introduce myself
to my birthmother.

I
didn't like the made up story and hidden truths and I
especially didn't like being told it didn't matter who
she was or where I came from. Of course it
mattered, and I was curious. Everybody else had a
birth story, but not me. So I took my information
and went to find my mother. I didn't find a
mother at that house, but this was the beginning of a
quest for information that is second nature to me
now. The psychological imperatives that fueled a
journey like this creates a neural pathway that lights
up when I hear: "No, you can't say that, know that or do
that."

Oh,
fiddle
de dee I say to all of that. Jeffrey Kaufman, by
the time you told people you were going to have your
client pin a crime on me and have him get off scot free,
you met your match...your lies and my neural pathway
intersected and you had a bar complaint, a press
release, an ebook, a website and a letter to the
President of the California Bar all telling the
story of what you tried to do. Diane Snyder, if
you think I made up the story of your attempt to run
over a process server why haven't I seen a cease and
desist instead of whining to the judge, "they don't like
me on the internet"? Former Judge Susan
Rankin when you refused to let expert witnesses testify
to help a mother, you too ran up against my neural
pathway that lights up with deceit, untruth, hidden
truths, and attempts to remake reality. John
Zervopolous who "might" give custody to an abuser, Gail
Inman who was told of abuse by a child and decided not
to report it, Judge Marilea Lewis who also lets an
abuser have custody and only recuses herself when a
picture of her with her lover is about to be identified
in open court - oh, you have all run up against my
neural pathway.

As
time goes by and I place my earliest unmasking of
a story in context with others, I see it boil down
to an engine of injustice propelling so many
quests. Little feelings morphing into big ones
that say, "This isn't right. I have to do something
about it. Why doesn't someone say something?" And
then you figure it out, "someone" is you.

When
they tell me, "you can't say that", and say it again and
again and again, I smile and said, "Of course I
can. I always do. I have to."

If
you find yourself in my writings and you find me
unmasking a story, a lie, a need for glory at someone's
expense, a use of power to get your way, don't blame the
messenger - my neurons made me do it.

Go behind the scenes of a
marriage of a man who uses words to shape reality and
find a destructive divorce. You might also find a best
selling memoir created out of thin air.

Nikki
Sixx
of Motley Crue hired one of L.A.'s champion divorce
lawyers to assist in his no holds barred destruction of
not one, but two wives, in divorce court. I
was there when the lies flew from his mouth accusing his
wife of being a high priced call girl and making sure
the press was there. That her father was there was
unimportant to him. What purpose those lies? A win
in divorce court at a kid's expense. Who needs her
father's lies about her mom in the media?

Where he destroys, his wife must build, where he
fabricates she pierces the veil of his fabricated
reality.

Best Selling Lie

Nikki
destroyed
whatever it is that holds a married life together.
With betrayals there was no trust; with lies, the
bridges holding them together fell apart; like
dominoes the marriage fell one day, one lie, at a time.
When the infrastructure of a life is gone a collapse is
inevitable.

With
every
needle he stuck in his arm and with every need he
fulfilled at Donna's expense, Nikki orchestrated the
end. The battering, the abuse,
Nikki's women, the control, the money Nikki spent
on clothes he never wore, the drugs he used like candy,
and the secrets he tried to hide through litigation.

Nikki
is no stranger to manipulating words. He uses that
talent for creating block busting Motley Crue lyrics and
it's his bread and butter. But I listened to him
in court use words to lie about Donna. He
wasn't believable, it was an act, but since he'd
invited the press his lies traveled the blogosphere with
a weight an aging rock star can carry to his adoring
fans. I wasn't surprised his attorney was one of
L.A.'s infamous pit bull, foul mouthed whores of
the court also using words to intimidate Donna. He
walked up to her outside the courtroom, and in front of
her father, Gary Fishbein said, "I don't know what
fucking games you are playing." But Gary should
know - he is a master game player.

Looking
for
love in all the wrong places, Nikki created a best
selling book, called it The Heroin
Diaries and pretended these were journal
entries from his heroin days. Only they
weren't. They were fabricated on the fly to make
the book a best seller. The ultimate high was a
national best seller and like any addict he needed the
fix of not only a trophy wife, a band that
wouldn't quit, but a spot on The New York Times
Best Selling List. Maybe he could rewrite it and
call it Methadone
Fix: How I Faked The Heroin Diaries.

Rehab
is a multi billion dollar industry that sometimes helps,
sometimes not. It comes prepackaged with a lingo
all its own with those in it regurgitating 'healing'
words from brochures and handouts from higher power
spouting therapists. Nikki went to rehab and learned
more ways to use words to prove he can manipulate those
around him: evaluators, therapists, lawyers, judges.
He's good.

I
don't dislike Nikki's never ending media love affair,
or the adoring fans who see what they want in him, but
if there's going to be a best seller chronicling a
trip to hell and back, let Donna write it. I'd
rather know how anyone can go from Baywatch babe to
raising Nikki's kids to homeschooling mom and
successfully representing herself in court against all
odds and come up smiling. I like winners - those
winners that happen because you write your own success
by living it, not by faking it. The music business is a
cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway
where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die
like dogs. There's also a negative side.
Hunter S. Thompson

Everybody wants their kids
to go to Stanford but nobody cares about the murder of
the woman who founded the University. It's a
cold case turned frozen tundra. I suppose
Stanford University's lukewarm reception to The Mysterious Death of
Jane Stanford (Stanford University Press, 2003)
by Stanford physician Robert W.P. Cutler was to be
expected.

But
I didn't. I read the review of Cutler's book and
thought, "This will be big news." I should have
thought, "This will be big cover-up."
Stanford took the path of least resistance and ignored
the tale of murder hoping it would fade
away. There were a few official murmurs about her
death but they took the form of "We like to look at the
good she did." Fair enough.

Jane
Stanford
did a lot of good. She and Leland wanted the best for
their son. They hired private tutors and took him
on world tours. From all accounts Leland Jr.
was an inquisitive, intelligent and kind young man with
a deep love of learning. Jane was a good
mother; Leland a good father. When Leland
Jr. died at fifteen the Stanfords used their enormous
wealth to start a university in honor and memory of
their son. It couldn't have been easy for Jane in
the time after Leland Jr.'s death. She was
drowning in diamonds and sorrow and it probably crossed
her mind that she would trade all the diamonds to have
her son back. It is said she had over 60 diamond
rings and that some of her jewels had belonged to Queen
Isabella of Spain. The Stanfords were the hedge
funds of their day. But they lost their only
child.

Nothing
was
easy for Jane in the years to come. Her husband
died as the university was being built. And
just as Stanford was thriving with its beautiful new
buildings, the 1906 earthquake came and shook them
down. Jane persevered and crafted the embryo of
the first class institution Stanford was to
become. She watched over its creation from
building design to instructors. She was strict in
who she wanted to teach there; her standards were high.

So
picture this: a strong woman with a lot of money,
determined to see things done her way. After all
it was her
vision, her money, and her tragedy that spawned Stanford
University. Fast forward over 100 years and we
find Jane being painted as a balls busting bitch in the
local Palo Alto newspaper. On March 22, 2008 the
Palo Alto Daily News ran a piece calling her autocratic,
the dowager empress , and commented that people were
terrified of her. By the time the article
stated, "She engaged in policy making, setting academic
standards, and even venturing into personnel matters."
one might forget that she was the President of the Board of
Trustees and had hired its President, David Starr
Jordan, and that her high standards are why
"The Farm" didn't revert to the farm.

Jane
died of strychnine poisoning on February 28, 1905
at the Moana Hotel in Waikiki after an earlier attempted
poisoning only the month before. Who killed her
and why? There is compelling evidence that we
might want to look at the then President of Stanford,
David Starr Jordan. Although it isn't exactly a PR
coup for Stanford to have a former President of
Stanford implicated in the murder of one of the
two founders of the University, Stanford also isn't
overwhelming me with its compassion for the woman some
call "the mother of Stanford." She sold her jewels to
fund the university. What did your mom do with
hers? Let's give some credit here and not throw
her murder into the dustbin of history.

The
strychnine
was in a bottle of bicarbonate of soda brought with her
to Hawaii. She did not use the bicarbonate until
the evening of the 28th leaving one to suspect it could
have been tainted in California. The medical
examiner held an inquest and found the cause of death to
be poison. David Starr Jordan said it was bad
food. The doctors called to help her saw spasms and
rigidity suggestive of poisoning. Jordan hired
his own doctor and paid him $15,000 and he, though in
California at the time of death, decided it was not
poison. In his book, medical doctor Cutler makes a
convincing case for poison, pointing to Jordan's hand in
it.

David
Starr
Jordan didn't get along with Jane. She was too
controlling for his tastes. He wanted her to keep
out of Stanford affairs. He was also a
eugenicist. One of Stanford's alums wrote a letter
to the editor of The Alumni Magazine after the book was
reviewed and proposed a theory. Quoting Margaret
Quigley from Political Research Associates:

Plans of eugenic murder, although
not commonplace, did on occasion creep into the writings
of eugenicists who were not seen as extremists. David
Starr Jordan, for example, then president of Stanford
University, wrote in 1911, "Dr. Amos G. Warner has well
said that the 'true function of charity is to restore to
usefulness those who are temporarily unfit, and to allow
those unfit from heredity to become extinct with as
little pain as possible.' Sooner or later the last duty
will not be less important or pressing than the first."

Go
Jordan! You pre-empted the Nazis and the Nobel
Sperm Bank. It's a good thing Stanford named the
Psychology building after you. There's a lot to
be learned from you. Jane,
you are not forgotten.Sit vis vobiscum

and she said to
me: Why am I... always
hiding under a rock? What do you say about a
born writer... not in fact doing anything
literary with it. Living and dying
unaccomplished and unknown... living only day
by day, without plans, without a future
orientation, I'm just floatin' along and
the current carries me sort of
unresisting, a person with a rich interior
life but I don't know, something's missing, I
make no mark somehow. I guess it really all
does come back to a version of voicelessness,
of just sort of living with that off and on
for as long as I can remember myself. It's
amazing to me how other people assert
themselves in life and ON life, assert
themselves, and I . . . mostly . . . don't.
......So that getting very quiet, getting
very small, trying to blend into the wall...
crawling under a rock, became my
habitual modus operandi.

Who the hell is she
talking about? You think you know someone
and then you realize you don't. She wrote
a book and thousands of people saw it on my
website. She wrote of corruption, courage
and love. She gave us a hero's journey
with long bus rides, taxis to strange ports,
defiance of demons, analyzed the letter and the
spirit of the law and with laser like vision
uncovered and explored and explained corruption
of institution and the human spirit. This
was not a quiet voice. It was a loud and
strong voice and it became part of my DNA as I
uploaded page after page and read her story and
trembled from its force and strength. "How did
she do this? How did she get so strong? Could I
have done the same?"

When I read her book I wrote:... listen
carefully, for Ema's voice thunders through
this book with truth and power and refusal to
accept the silencing. She embraces pain
and demands justice. This is a hero's journey:
a heart motivated fury, outrage tempered with
wisdom and this book is a gift to all of us.

If she thinks she is voiceless, what do I
hear? If she thinks she left no mark, why
am I changed? What current is she riding
that brings her to the shores were books are
written without effort?

And when her voice is not thundering, it
whispers in delicate tones, "Come see what I
see, I find beauty and I will show you".
Listen as she takes us home with her and shares
her visions with words we mortals only yearn to
have:

I never lose the
awareness that this winter represents my
valedictory season in the lovely house with the
view.

The weather has
cooperated by bringing the winter rains
early. Below the house, the terraced
hillsides and the fields are every shade of
green. The dog dives ecstatically into the
long grass of the vacant lot beside our house,
and emerges with her black-and-gold snout
covered in raindrops and dew.

Usually the peak
month for green is February, but this year the
color has come two months early and is
lasting. The palm tree is weighted with
golden date clusters. The oak and avocado
groves still wear their burnished foliage.
The pecan grove has lost its leaves, but the
slim white branches are lovely against the
verdure.

On occasion, an
unseasonably hot day's breeze will carry the
fragrance of the first wild flowers. It's
as if autumn, winter and spring have conspired
to display themselves simultaneously, as in a
fashion spectacle of vividly colored,
soft-textured, perfumed fabrics.

If this is what
lies hidden under a rock where she lives
- then under a rock, in a faraway place
- a literary goddess, a natural brunette,
grows enchantingly beautiful with her
siren songs. And her day to day living
is richer by far than any five year plan could
ever be. Eat your heart out, The Art of
the Deal, for this is the Art of
Living.

I am looking for a support group for my
life. Procrastination before anything is my motto.
That means breakfast at noon, cleaning the Mac's
keyboard before I write, deciding
that sun on a February afternoon is too good to miss and
since I'm out I need to stop at
Peet's or Starbucks. I haven't finished the San
Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal or
The NY Times so how can I possibly write in case I
have missed an important piece of trivia?
Then there is the L.A. Times online,
Google and cnn sitting there with more. More
blogs,
more news, more information.

The good news is I am never bored.

I need a support group not only for
procrastination. And those who answer emails from
people asking for help who don't want to pay? How
about checking stats all day long - look, 500
people on my
website by noon. Then I have to find out what city
they are in. Maybe now it is time for
another coffee and let's sell a domain name and I
haven't talked to my kid in college for 24
hours and maybe DNA tests have come down in price and
before I die I can find out what
bullets I dodged.

I have my listservs to read and disagree
with. Email to be checked every ten minutes.
Stocks to watch. The top of the fridge probably is
dusty. Am I out of creme de menthe?

It's a good thing I found $70.00 in a drawer
because I haven't made any money all day
and now I can go out for coffee again and not feel
guilty.

I'm still looking for my support group.
Silicon Valley mid life blond on the 'net seeks help.
Bring Ritalin and coffee, hold the Prozac.

"...one
of the systemic influences on lying in the legal
system
is that lying is a norm. It's an insidious
development.
We lawyers start by justifying it in
circumstances
in which 'everybody does it'. Then, once
on
the slippery slope of justification, we find it
easy
to rationalize lying in more and more
circumstances.
Eventually, it becomes so commonplace
that
we're now unconscious of it."

"...lying is a norm." Oh please, give me
shelter from the norm.

Cutting to the chase: attorney Ron Romines,
Mayor of Woodside, CA represented my ex husband in
a post trial, post appeal collaborative law disaster.
There is a bar complaint pending for various ethical
violations.

Engage your mirror neurons and come along with me for a
ride on one of those ethical violations. Your spouse has
hired an attorney at $350.00 per hour, two hour meeting
each time. You pay for two attorneys at this price. Both
attorneys engage you in a process based on honesty,
transparency, and full disclosure. Should one of the
clients fail in any of these, they are thrown out
of the process. The attorneys are not expected to
engage in deception and the emphasis is not on their
actions.

But this process has no oversight. Behind closed
doors there is no court reporter. No digital recorder.
No technology: we move backwards in time. While
earning their $350.00+ an hour, the attorneys take turns
being stenographers. They are multitasking while
representing a client. These handwritten notes are typed
up by a secretary and this becomes the "official
record". Should you not rebut each and every
mistake, they use your words against you. But I
digress. There is no oversight.

In any situation devoid of oversight, corruption creeps
in.

From the office of Attorney Ron Romines to
Attorney Michael Lowy:

Michael,

There is a series of
emails that I am forwarding to you pursuant to Ron's
discussion with you before he left on vacation. There
are 9 emails.

Laura,Assistant to Ron
Romines

Attorney-client privilege has a such high place
in law that breaking it by sharing client emails with
opposing counsel is reason for disbarment.

If a lawyer cares so little about following the law,
about breaking ethics violations, can this same lawyer
really be the model for the citizens of Woodside?

Woodside prides itself on its woodsy, horsy, small
town with big bucks, cozy, we're all friends
atmosphere. Oh a few tiffs over bike riding,
parked cars and Steve Jobs, but it is a tight knit
community. Just like the collaborative law
community. And do they police themselves? They do
not.

Coverups may not seem so important in small town, have a
venture capitalist over for Sunday brunch kinda town,
but that's the point. Corruption anywhere, whether
in the academic air of Stanford University and cancer
cures withheld so spouse will not benefit, or
Philip Zimbardo's prison experiment, or a small meeting
room with a very small amount of money at stake, but two
monstrously evil attorneys, harming the clients paying
them.

Do you think "monstrously evil" is over the top?
Ask: Is there "baby evil?"

Walk on the slippery slope, and it doesn't matter.
Baby evil turns into monster evil.

Would you hire an attorney that lies about you?

Would you hire Ron Romines who wrote an email to
opposing counsel agreeing to an ethics violation that
harmed the collaborative people he promised to help? And
then lie about it?

Is this what you want as Mayor of small, bucolic
Woodside?

Only if you justify it:

"...one
of the systemic influences on lying in the legal
system
is that lying is a norm. It's an insidious
development.
We lawyers start by justifying it in
circumstances
in which 'everybody does it'. Then, once
on
the slippery slope of justification, we find it
easy
to rationalize lying in more and more
circumstances.
Eventually, it becomes so commonplace
that
we're now unconscious of it."

Ron Romines as Mayor of Woodside and the citizens
therein are no better than those who rationalize
"everybody does it." From there, larger and larger
lies become easier and easier to justify.

And one day, the monsters are running the town, the city
and the country.

Crawford Texas is a small town with horses too.

"...lying is a norm."
Find
me shelter from the norm.

The Town Council is
the legislative body of the Town of Woodside, with all
the regulatory and corporate powers provided under
California state law. The Town Council provides
the policy direction that guides the operation of the
Town, adopts ordinances and resolutions that
constitute the legislative intent of the Town, and
sets the Town's priorities through the adoption
of an annual budget and the provision of direction to
the Town Manager. The Town Council represents the
Town's residents through these actions and
through the conveyance of constituent requests
and concerns to the Town staff. The Town Council also
appoints all members to all advisory committees,
the Planning Commission, and the Architectural
and Site Review Board.

I want to write about funny things. I like
funny and I like laughing. However, as much as I
try, as I wander down the highways and byways of this
journey of my divorce (Hello Patrick; hey there
Kirby; Roy - great to see you again; oops, there
is John, don't want to take that turn) I realize there
is nothing funny about being tired. And sick. And
hated.

Maybe though I will surprise us and find some humor
here.

It isn't that I am not likeable, and it isn't that I
don't try to be nice, but I make attorneys angry.

Jim told me attorney Jeffrey Kaufman hated me because I
challenged him. You bet, I did. What do you
say to a man who says he wants to hit you over the head
with a 2x4? "Hey sweetie, do it
again?" I didn't have to tell him, Jeffrey has a
Santa Claus size bag of 2x4's and he never ran out. I
don't stand still as the board beckons.

I was abandoned twice in this monster sized
divorce. I should have seen it coming. My divorce
attorneys have a manner of speaking: "Hi there, nice
retainer, well, gotta go now." One even dropped me into
the abyss while telling me he filed my brief in the
appeals court. In fact, he had never begun writing it.
The state Bar wasn't happy with that and sent him
packing.

Having been dragged through both a trial and an appeal,
Mr. 2x4 wasn't ready to end it yet. He said, "Ann,
let's mediate." "Or collaborate." Aw, jeez,
Jeffrey, that's what I said years ago. Was
it the money that made you continue? You entice
clients with a small retainer and then egg them on, "You
aren't going to let him do that to you, are you?" And
out comes the checkbook.

I was warned about collaborative. Strongly, fiercely
warned: don't go there, don't do it, you will never get
out. The attorneys who told me not to do it were
familiar with my case - the husband who wears you out,
buries you in motions, ignores requests to settle, and
wants your attention: See, I have money to go on and on
and you do not.

I listened to the warnings, but I was tired. Six
years of a divorce - court dates, trial, appeal. I won!
I thought it was over. Listen carefully: nothing is ever
over with someone who wants to keep it going. Unless you
have stamina, money and a lawyer who doesn't mind
leveling the playing field, you very well may die before
the divorce is over.

In collaborative law four people sit around a table and
discuss things. Hovering over is the Collaborative
God. You are in a box, breathing the fumes of the holy
collaborator, using words like Orwell: "Ann, we don't
speak of fraud, we talk of 'the troubling times.'
Read that again. The holy grail of collaborative speak
is to replace truth with fiction, and pretend negatives
don't exist.

However, should there be a negative, rest assured that
"the team" is all on your side ready and eager to
problem solve together.

Or so goes the myth. My team was
different. They helped my husband buy a house. We
were there to get my judgment monies to me and instead
he used it to buy a house. Oh, the collaborative god is
laughing!

I'm still trying to figure that one out.

Disclosure of investment opportunity? Oh, well,
ignore that Ann.

Is this the funny part? The part that says that says to
the collaborators: hey, I have an idea - let's
collaborate, we need to put the truth on the table
and follow the rules you set up.

The Collaborative God has other ideas like this one:
Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Which
translates to: "We don't have to follow the law. Isn't
that great?"

The DaVinci code brings us a married Jesus with a French
bloodline to this day. The Collaborative Code brings us
a divorcing couple with IV Valium in their bloodline
when they realize: I am unprotected from the forces of
randomness if we can ignore the family code, bond with
the one we like, ignore the facts and force some
win-win. I lost everything and here were these men
trying to figure out how to give more to my ex-husband.

If this is unprotected law, then give me Code
Condom. Unprotected law is the biggest danger of
collaborative.

We have a vengeful god here. He does not like the Family
Code, it stands in the way of win-win; a nice idea
except when it isn't.

"Deep inside my heart I know I can't escape. Oh Mama,
can this really be the end, to be stuck inside of
Mobile with the Memphis blues again?" Bob Dylan

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------11.A
LONG WALK FOR A LOST MOTHER

If
there was a cosmic lost and found I could have asked
for my mother and father. I was a little girl
lost in the world of people with parents and somewhere
two people were missing a little girl. Surely
there must be a way of connecting them, of making us
all whole again. I made a jingle about it:
Funny little family of three that was never to be.

People
used
to ask if I was angry at them for giving me away at
birth. No, I always said, I am curious and I
have many questions: Who were they, what
did they look like, where are they now, why did they
give me away, do I have siblings, where were they
born, what religion are they, what is their
background, do they think of me?

Some
people
close their eyes and pray for help. I would
close my eyes and think of them but no images
appeared. I had a cloud where the image should have
been. That's how they felt to me: wispy images always
floating away. I was as adrift as they and felt like I
had no anchor and no foundation.

So
I did what every ten or eleven year old does. I
stole my adoption file! Oh, you want to know how
a kid could do that, steal the original, not just what
my parents had? How did she get her hands on legal
papers available only to the lawyer? Never mind,
that's my secret - I need one too.

It
was me! There I was, fully identified: Baby
Blanton, illegitimate. It mattered not a bit I
was called illegitimate at the same time I went
unnamed. (If it doesn't belong to you, you don't dare
name it?) I had come from somewhere. There was a
mother's name. A place she was born. An age. She had
other children.I had siblings. My god, I was out of my
mind with information overload. I took the file and
all its papers and studied them late that night in my
bedroom. They were more precious than gold. Me! Me! It
was me! I had a beginning, just like everyone else.

Okay,
maybe
not like everyone else. Mine was a truncated
beginning: "Hello baby, nice to see ya, time to go."
Seven days the papers said and then, off I went to the
land where people are chosen, not born. Father it
said, was unknown.

At
the time, flush with knowledge of a mother and
siblings, it seemed less important to know my father
then. So, I did what any private detective, age
eleven, would do. I found the last known address of
Doris Blanton from the lawyer's notes and took the
file (for proof of course) and walked to her house
after school.

I
remember it like it was yesterday. I knew as soon as I
got there she wasn't there. And she wasn't. I later
learned she had lived there, but moved after I was
born. So then I did the next thing I could think
of. I started calling the Blantons in the phone
book. I sure could have used the cosmic lost and found
by this time. The phone book got me nowhere.

So
I went on living and growing up and graduating college
and getting married and having babies and then one day
I said, "It's time to find my mother." And that
afternoon I was on the phone with my half sister. But
not my mother.

The
time to find her had passed and so had she. I
missed her by nine months. She died at age
52.

I
looked for my father several years later. He too was
gone, also in his 50's. I was his only child.

The
cosmic
lost and found, where babies and mothers and fathers
float like clouds , looking for one another, is only
in my mind. My adoption file is still with me
but it is only paper. The promise it once held, was
only half filled. I have information but it's a
wispy thing when compared to flesh and blood.

Problems, failures and
disappointments, when put into the proper perspective,
make alchemists of us all.

Failure
is
always with us; a constant.

Success,
optimism,
reframing, gratitude, resiliency - all of these exist
because we fail or are failures and we need to know how
to deal with them. If the
fact that life is a series of failures sounds
depressing, I urge you to reframe that thought.

Resiliency
is
a major topic in positive psychology. Something
did not work out and we have to bounce back. Something
failed - a process, a marriage, a trial, a child in
school, a science experiment, a product design.
Somewhere someone, or something, failed. Carefully
crafted hopes are crushed, dreams broken, plans stopped.

We
can become our own failure analysts, learning from the
failures, and building stronger and wiser next time.

Where
Will He Be 20 Years From Now?

Several
years
ago I rented a studio in back of the house to someone
from England. He had a business plan, so he rented an
office. This was Silicon Valley and new technology
starts here, doesn't it?

His
idea was a great one: a portable music device. But his
idea depended on licensing music, individually. It
couldn't be done. Except, that it could, just not
by him. He returned to England. Soon thereafter, the
iPod hit the market. It was his idea, but done by
Steve Jobs. Is this man a failure? Oh, yes, he failed to
build a prototype, think through all the problems, and
he let his enthusiasm for the idea carry him all the way
into a high rent office on University Ave before he was
ready.

Will he succeed? Time will tell if
he looks at this as, "Steve Jobs and I came up
with the same idea!" or, "I can't compete with a world
full of people like Steve Jobs." Identify yourself
as one with brilliant ideas and learn from experience,
or decide you can't make it because the competition is
too fierce - the choice is where optimism meets failure.
The intersection is where the future lies.

My Big
Fat Life Failures

I
am a bundle of failures.

My
story is one failure after another.

"....yes
I
said yes I will Yes." - Molly Bloom, Ulysses

I put this quote out where I can
read it. It reminds me to say yes to choices, intuition,
kids, ourselves, to give permission for something, to
make mistakes, to be a failure and to be a success. Yes
to speaking my mind, having voice and giving it to
others. Yes, it says to me, I will do this, yes,
there are risks, yes, I am a risk taker, yes I will go
forth yes I will be hurt and yes I will be loved for the
same thing I will be hated for. Yes, I am. Yes. No
is for special occasions: "No, I am not a doormat. No,
you may not abuse me, steal from me and lie about me."
Yes, I mean that.

We can assist you with
a private, domestic adoption. Or if you need asurrogate or egg
donor, we would be pleased to assist you. Contact ourfamily formation firm
so we can discuss how to best create yourfamily.

So now we have family formation firms for any
situation. Want designer clothes and a
designer kid? Why not. Prada and pregnancy is no
big deal. Not up to pregnancy? Rent a womb. No
sperm? They got sperm. They got eggs.

But should grown up Jordan or Jordanette want some
background one day, problems abound.

Lying is the norm in design a family and design a kid
options. In adoption, adoptive parents may
be told the birth mother was a college grad and that she
was the same religion as they - and neither fact is
true. The birth father may be given a false but
prestigious occupation.

Recently it has been discovered (and who is shocked?)
that sperm donors lie (you think?). They lie about
their SAT scores and their parent's occupation and their
medical history. Sperm banks lie when confronted
with 25 kids all suffering from the same genetic disease
causing them to be afflicted with skin problems, then
kidney dialysis. And they continue to sell the bad
sperm. (It's called profit motive)

I have sperm donor applications from 25 years ago. All
they asked for was name and address and age. Now there's
background for you - John Doe, 123 Dorm, age 18.
But hey - someone who "really, really wanted a baby" got
their wish. The selfish gene truly dominates.

Experiment on babies? This isn't news. It's business as
usual. As long as someone who "really, really wants a
baby" gets it, who cares about the human rights issue of
the kid? No one in the design a family industry.

Now we have genetic information so specialized we can
order up a redhead with fast twitch fibers for running
the distance. And when she wants to know, can I order up
the parents I want, you have to explain, design-a-parent
is still only a dream.

May 30

FENCES:

IIIIIIIIIIII

Hedges between, keep friendships green.Proverb

IIIIIIIIIIII

Love your neighbor but don't pull down your hedge.Ben Franklin

14. My Neurons Make Me Do
It

People ask if I am afraid of writing about the ethical
lapses of a judge in Texas with ties to the Bush
family or her cohorts that manipulate the system to their
advantage. Or do I worry about writing an unflattering
piece about an L.A. divorce attorney who could
teach Houdini a trick or two? Do I worry about making
fun of Palo Alto lawyers who teach ethics and turn around
and share private client emails with one another throwing
ethics out the window? Or sending proof of fraud of an
attorney to his peers?

Of course not. This isn't the stuff in life to
worry about. I worry about why my low carb diet isn't
working this time and why hiking and biking aren't the easy
ways to lose weight they used to be and why children have to
die in wars.

My brain isn't wired to worry about what will happen if I
unmask certain truths. Let the chips fall where they
may. A made up story told to me long ago and a
chance to uncover the truth began a neural
pathway that determined future action. I was
nine or ten when I couldn't stand not knowing her one more
minute and I grabbed my birth certificate and walked for two
miles to introduce myself to my birthmother.

I didn't like the made up story and hidden truths and I
especially didn't like being told it didn't matter who she
was or where I came from. Of course it mattered, and I
was curious. Everybody else had a birth story, but not
me. So I took my information and went to find my
mother. I didn't find a mother at that house, but
this was the beginning of a quest for information that is
second nature to me now. The psychological imperatives
that fueled a journey like this creates a neural pathway
that lights up when I hear: "No, you can't say that, know
that or do that."

Oh, fiddle de dee I say to all of that. Jeffrey
Kaufman, by the time you told people you were going to have
your client pin a crime on me and have him get off scot
free, you met your match...your lies and my neural pathway
intersected and you had a bar complaint, a press release, an
ebook, a website and a letter to the President of the
California Bar all telling the story of what you tried
to do. Diane Snyder, if you think I made up the story
of your attempt to run over a process server why haven't I
seen a cease and desist instead of whining to the judge,
"they don't like me on the internet"? Former
Judge Susan Rankin when you refused to let expert witnesses
testify to help a mother, you too ran up against my neural
pathway that lights up with deceit, untruth, hidden truths,
and attempts to remake reality. John Zervopolous who
"might" give custody to an abuser, Gail Inman who was told
of abuse by a child and decided not to report it,
Judge Marilea Lewis who also lets an abuser have custody and
only recuses herself when a picture of her with her lover is
about to be identified in open court - oh, you have all run
up against my neural pathway.

As time goes by and I place my earliest unmasking of a
story in context with others, I see it boil down to an
engine of injustice propelling so many quests. Little
feelings morphing into big ones that say, "This isn't right.
I have to do something about it. Why doesn't someone
say something?" And then you figure it out, "someone" is
you.

When they tell me, "you can't say that", and say it again
and again and again, I smile and said, "Of course I
can. I always do. I have to."

If you find yourself in my writings and you find me
unmasking a story, a lie, a need for glory at someone's
expense, a use of power to get your way, don't blame the
messenger - my neurons made me do it.

15.
NIKKI SIXX and THE METHADONE DIARIESGo behind the scenes of a
marriage of a man who uses words to shape reality and find
a destructive divorce. You might also find a best selling
memoir created out of thin air.

I watched Donna D'Errico,
the actress best known for Baywatch, pierce the veil
of the reality her rocker husband created. Nikki
Sixx of Motley Crue hired one of L.A.'s champion divorce
lawyers to assist in his no holds barred destruction of
Donna in divorce court. Now remaking her
career in several indie films with Andie McDowell
and others, Donna is the antithesis of Nikki. Where
he destroys she builds, where he fabricates she defends
with truth.

Donna gave up a lot of
money in order to take control of her
life. If you know what it is like always being
controlled you know the feeling of a life lived on your
own terms. Donna was finished with Nikki dictating
the terms of everything.

Now she is free to
tell the story of her life: the battering, the
abuse, Nikki's women, the control, the money Nikki
spent on clothes he never wore, the drugs he used like
candy, and the secrets he tried to hide through
litigation.

Although Donna paid a high
price for freedom, the price of not having it was way too
high.

Best
Selling Lie

Nikki destroyed
whatever it is that holds a married life together.
With betrayals there was no trust; with lies, the
bridges holding them together fell apart; like
dominoes the marriage and Donna's ability to cope fell
apart. When the infrastructure of a life is gone, a
collapse is inevitable.

With every needle he stuck
in his arm and with every need he fulfilled at Donna's
expense, Nikki orchestrated the end.

He had multiple affairs
while she was pregnant, he drank, he did drugs. When
Donna found the emails to the various women she was
humiliated, hurt and very, very angry. Afraid of losing
her, Nikki went into rehab. He wrote to Donna every
day talking about his journey through rehab, his pain, his
needs, his life. But Donna was left without a cocoon
of her own to work her way through her needs and her pain.
Rehab was all about Nikki - no doubt he needed it, but no
one identified the other victim - Donna.

Donna said the pain inside
of her was so strong and so big and overwhelming that she
created a wall for his words to bounce off of, like
Teflon. She wanted to silence him because hearing
nothing was better than hearing his hollow words
birthed from the recovery industry.

Rehab is a multi billion
dollar industry that sometimes helps, sometimes not.
It comes prepackaged with a lingo all its own with those
in it regurgitating 'healing' words from brochures and
handouts from higher power spouting therapists.

Nikki is no stranger to
manipulating words. He uses that talent for creating
block busting Motley Crue lyrics and its his bread and
butter. But I listened to him in court use words
to lie about Donna. He wasn't believable, it
was an act, but he'd invited the press that day and so his
lies traveled the blogosphere with a weight an aging rock
star can carry to his adoring fans. I wasn't
surprised his attorney was one of L.A.'s infamous pit
bull, gutter living, foul mouthed whores of the court
using words any way he could to intimidate Donna. He
walked up to her outside the courtroom, and in front of
her father, Gary Fishbein said, "I don't know what fucking
games you are playing." But Gary, you are the master
game player, Donna only holds the mirror up.
Reflections tell the truth.

Looking for love in all
the wrong places, Nikki created a best selling book,
called it The Heroin Diaries
and pretended these were journal entries from his heroin
days. Only they weren't. They were fabricated
on the fly to make the book a best seller. The
ultimate high was a national best seller and like any
addict he needed the fix of not only a trophy wife,
a band that wouldn't quit, but a spot on The New
York Times Best Selling List. Maybe he could rewrite
it and call it Methadone Fix: How I Faked The Heroin
Diaries.

I don't dislike Nikki's
never ending media love affair, or the adoring fans who
see what they want in him, but if there's going to be a
best seller chronicling a trip to hell and back, let
Donna write it. I'd rather know how anyone can go from
Baywatch babe to raising Nikki's kids to homeschooling mom
and successfully representing herself in court against all
odds and come up smiling. I like winners - those
winners that happen because you write your own success by
living it, not by faking it.

The music business is a
cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway
where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like
dogs. There's also a negative side. Hunter
S. Thompson

16.
WHO KILLED JANE STANFORD?

Everybody wants their kids
to go to Stanford but nobody cares about the murder of the
woman who founded the University. It's a cold
case turned frozen tundra. I suppose Stanford
University's lukewarm reception to The Mysterious Death of Jane
Stanford (Stanford University Press, 2003) by
Stanford physician Robert W.P. Cutler was to be expected.

But I didn't. I read
the review of Cutler's book and thought, "This will be big
news." I should have thought, "This will be big
cover-up." Stanford took the path of least
resistance and ignored the tale of murder hoping it
would fade away. There were a few official murmurs
about her death but they took the form of "We like to look
at the good she did." Fair enough.

Jane Stanford did a lot of
good. She and Leland wanted the best for their son.
They hired private tutors and took him on world
tours. From all accounts Leland Jr. was an
inquisitive, intelligent and kind young man with a deep
love of learning. Jane was a good mother;
Leland a good father. When Leland Jr. died at
fifteen the Stanfords used their enormous wealth to start
a university in honor and memory of their son. It
couldn't have been easy for Jane in the time after Leland
Jr.'s death. She was drowning in diamonds and
sorrow and it probably crossed her mind that she would
trade all the diamonds to have her son back. It is
said she had over 60 diamond rings and that some of her
jewels had belonged to Queen Isabella of Spain. The
Stanfords were the hedge funds of their day. But
they lost their only child.

Nothing was easy for Jane
in the years to come. Her husband died as the
university was being built. And just as
Stanford was thriving with its beautiful new
buildings, the 1906 earthquake came and shook them
down. Jane persevered and crafted the embryo of the
first class institution Stanford was to become. She
watched over its creation from building design to
instructors. She was strict in who she wanted to
teach there; her standards were high.

So picture this: a strong
woman with a lot of money, determined to see things
done her way. After all it was her vision, her money, and her
tragedy that spawned Stanford University. Fast
forward over 100 years and we find Jane being painted as a
balls busting bitch in the local Palo Alto
newspaper. On March 22, 2008 the Palo Alto Daily
News ran a piece calling her autocratic, the dowager
empress , and commented that people were terrified of
her. By the time the article stated, "She
engaged in policy making, setting academic standards, and
even venturing into personnel matters." one might forget
that she was the
President of the Board of Trustees and had hired its
President, David Starr Jordan, and that her high
standards are why "The Farm" didn't revert to the
farm.

Jane died of strychnine
poisoning on
February 28, 1905 at the Moana Hotel in Waikiki after an earlier attempted
poisoning only the month before. Who killed her and
why? There is compelling evidence that we might want
to look at the then President of Stanford, David Starr
Jordan. Although it isn't exactly a PR coup for
Stanford to have a former President of Stanford
implicated in the murder of one of the two founders of the
University, Stanford also isn't overwhelming me with its
compassion for the woman some call "the mother of
Stanford." She sold her jewels to fund the
university. What did your mom do with hers?
Let's give some credit here and not throw her murder into
the dustbin of history.

The strychnine was
in a bottle of bicarbonate of soda brought with her to
Hawaii. She did not use the bicarbonate until the
evening of the 28th leaving one to suspect it could have
been tainted in California. The medical examiner
held an inquest and found the cause of death to be
poison. David Starr Jordan said it was bad food. The
doctors called to help her saw spasms and rigidity
suggestive of poisoning. Jordan hired his own
doctor and paid him $15,000 and he, though in California
at the time of death, decided it was not poison. In his
book, medical doctor Cutler makes a convincing case for
poison, pointing to Jordan's hand in it.

David Starr Jordan didn't
get along with Jane. She was too controlling for his
tastes. He wanted her to keep out of Stanford
affairs. He was also a eugenicist. One
of Stanford's alums wrote a letter to the editor of The
Alumni Magazine after the book was reviewed and proposed a
theory. Quoting Margaret Quigley from Political
Research Associates:

Plans
of eugenic murder, although not commonplace, did on
occasion creep into the writings of eugenicists who were
not seen as extremists. David Starr Jordan, for example,
then president of Stanford University, wrote in 1911, "Dr.
Amos G. Warner has well said that the 'true function of
charity is to restore to usefulness those who are
temporarily unfit, and to allow those unfit from heredity
to become extinct with as little pain as possible.' Sooner
or later the last duty will not be less important or
pressing than the first."

Go Jordan! You
pre-empted the Nazis and the Nobel Sperm Bank. It's
a good thing Stanford named the Psychology building after
you. There's a lot to be learned from you.

Jane, you are not forgotten. Sit vis vobiscum

17. Under the Rock, A Goddess
Grows

and she said to
me: Why am I... always hiding under a rock?
What do you say about a born writer... not in fact
doing anything literary with it. Living and
dying unaccomplished and unknown... living only day by
day, without plans, without a future orientation, I'm
just floatin' along and the current carries
me sort of unresisting, a person with a rich interior
life but I don't know, something's missing, I make no
mark somehow. I guess it really all does come back to
a version of voicelessness, of just sort of living
with that off and on for as long as I can remember
myself. It's amazing to me how other people assert
themselves in life and ON life, assert themselves, and
I . . . mostly . . . don't. ......So that getting
very quiet, getting very small, trying to blend into
the wall... crawling under a rock, became my
habitual modus operandi.

Who the hell is she talking about?
You think you know someone and then you realize you
don't. She wrote a book and thousands of people
saw it on my website. She wrote of corruption,
courage and love. She gave us a hero's journey
with long bus rides, taxis to strange ports, defiance of
demons, analyzed the letter and the spirit of the law
and with laser like vision uncovered and explored and
explained corruption of institution and the human
spirit. This was not a quiet voice. It was a
loud and strong voice and it became part of my DNA
as I uploaded page after page and read her story and
trembled from its force and strength. "How did she do
this? How did she get so strong? Could I have done the
same?"

When I read her book I wrote:... listen carefully,
for Ema's voice thunders through this book with truth
and power and refusal to accept the silencing.
She embraces pain and demands justice. This is a
hero's journey: a heart motivated fury, outrage
tempered with wisdom and this book is a gift to all of
us.

If she thinks she is voiceless, what do I hear? If
she thinks she left no mark, why am I changed?
What current is she riding that brings her to the shores
were books are written without effort?

And when her voice is not thundering, it whispers in
delicate tones, "Come see what I see, I find beauty and
I will show you". Listen as she takes us home with
her and shares her visions with words we mortals only
yearn to have:

I never lose the awareness
that this winter represents my valedictory season in the
lovely
house with the view.

The weather has cooperated
by bringing the winter rains early. Below the
house, the
terraced hillsides and the fields are every shade
of green. The dog dives ecstatically into
the long grass of the vacant lot beside our house, and
emerges with her black-and-gold
snout covered in raindrops and dew.

Usually the peak month for
green is February, but this year the color has come two
months
early and is lasting. The palm tree is weighted
with golden date clusters. The oak and avocado
groves still wear their burnished foliage. The
pecan grove has lost its leaves, but the slim white
branches are lovely against the verdure.

On occasion, an
unseasonably hot day's breeze will carry the fragrance
of the first wild flowers.
It's as if autumn, winter and spring have
conspired to display themselves simultaneously, as in
a fashion spectacle of vividly colored, soft-textured,
perfumed fabrics.

If this is what lies
hidden under a rock where she lives - then under
a rock, in a faraway place - a literary goddess, a
natural brunette, grows enchantingly beautiful
with her siren songs. And her day to day living
is richer by far than any five year plan could ever
be. Eat your heart out, The Art of the Deal,
for this is the Art of Living.

18. Gratitude From Around the World:
I am so Grateful

My hard drive is failing, causing me to back up, delete,
move, organize and reread
many items on my computer. I use gmail but a lot of my
online presence still has
another email address. I have been sorting through and
rereading emails from
people who have written to me.

I am so lucky to have people that like to thank me, explain
where I am wrong, tell
me they like me, and tell me I am nuts. I find feedback
gratifying; it is when
people do not care enough to write that there is a problem.

Gratitude is used in positive psychology often. Maybe even
seen by some as the cornerstone
- if you are full of gratitude, you will be happier. I don't
doubt it. I trust that being
truly grateful for many things is better than being
miserable about just as many. I am certainly
happier for the knowledge that I can flip a switch and go
into grateful mode, and engage
it often.

Gratitude journals, though, aren't for me. And being
grateful by comparison ('I am grateful
I have food while others starve') is really not me. I don't
like comparisons - if you haven't
got the common sense to see and know a home is better than a
street corner, I think we
haven't taught you very well in life so far.

Gratitude is above the comparison mode. It is recognition of
change in yourself brought
on not by circumstance but by intent.

"At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark
from another person. Each of us has cause to think
with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame
within us." Albert Schweitzer

Thank you - from Zimbabwe to United Arab Emirates, to Paris
and Egypt and Canada, and
the U.S, and all those from places I didn't mention - thank
you for lighting the flame
within me with your words. I am so very grateful and my only
regret is not sharing a meal
or a drink with all of you in friendship and companionship.
We share the electrons and
oh, how grateful I am for that.

19.
AndtheAward Goes To........

Wouldn't it be great if
life were like a game? It wouldn't be hard to feel
great if we were the
star quarterback - where we're always winning andthe crowds are cheering us on, the coach is always proud of us and cheerleaders shout our
name. But we don't have a life like this
so we become our own cheerleaders and find the guts and glory within
ourselves to keep on going whether we get the ball to the goal or not.

But this isn't always easy
and many can't get there.
Some people can't make it out of bed in the morning when things don't go
right, some make a half-hearted attempt and wonder why they don't get
what they want. Some rise to the occasion once and never again. But
sometimes you meet that rare individual that is born with
a gusto for life; who gets the dregs of a situation and
wonders how many ways there are to figure out how to make
it whole again. This person doesn't always realize
it but she speaks the language of success. Her words propel her
to things that others say can't be done. Her
vocabulary is studded with metaphors of winning and if ever she stumbles she
doesn't worry, she does a mental juggling act and an automatic edit and rewrite
kicks in. Her audience forgets she isn't wealthy or
well known because she doesn't care about that. Her
friends are her team, her struggle is a battle she will
win, her "what if's" become strategy and what she doesn't know becomes
a challenge not a problem. Watching her in action is
like watching the
waves roll backward - you don't quite know what you are
seeing and
it is unexpected.

Far too many live without
being transformational. They have no power to change
the people around them or
circumstances. They cede their powers and leave it up to fate.
There is a hesitancy about them and a sense the lights of their life are less
electric than others.

But in a small apartment
in Dallas lives a woman who not only stars in the game of life, she has
cheerleaders and
fans and
she shows them how to live life grandly and big and grab it and find their lights and power. She is visible
and confident and fearless and we think, "If she can, we
can." And
wherever you meet someone like that, hold on to her
because forces of nature should not be tamed; the penalties are fearsome.
And you say, if Janay can dream it, we will be
there for her.

Dumb Blond only has one
Brunette Award. I am happy to award this year's Brunette of the Year to a woman who can make
judges weep and
lawyers tremble, who punishes the bad and rewards the good with her
enthusiasm. For inspiring others to go on and star in their own games and helps them play the game of life as winners.

And
most of all, because she is a resting place, a nesting
place, for a little girl who is on a journey
home. To JBR, the highest honor from the world of blonds: Brunette of
the Year.